St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar Series - Paul Johnson

Wed 13 February 2019

St Catharine's College

Speaker:
PAUL JOHNSON has been director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies since January 2011. He is also a visiting professor in the economics department at UCL. He is a columnist for The Times and is currently also a member of the UK Climate Change Committee, and of the Banking Standards Board. Previous roles have included time as chief economist at the Department for Education and as director of public spending at HM Treasury, where he also served as deputy head of the government economic service. He is a frequent contributor to written and broadcast media and has made a number of radio programmes. His interests include tax, welfare, inequality, pensions, education, labour markets, health spending, climate change and public finances. Paul Johnson is author of books on pensions, tax, and inequality. He holds honorary doctorates from UCL and the University of Exeter. He was appointed CBE in the 2018 birthday honours. He was a member of the winning Keble college Oxford team in the 2017/18 Christmas University Challenge series.

Talk overview:
Later this year we should hear the outcome of the spending review – arguably the most important non-Brexit related decision of this parliament. A decade after the financial crisis we are still experiencing its consequences in much lower living standards than we might have expected and also in much lower levels of government spending. After facing the biggest deficit in peacetime history, since
2010 the government has implemented the biggest set of spending cuts since at least the 1940s. Yet in many ways governments since 2010 have followed exactly the priorities of previous administrations such that health is taking an ever growing fraction of all spending.Paul Johnson will trace the changes in public finances and public spending, set out some of the options and challenges in the forthcoming spending review, as well as looking at opposition policy. He will argue that future pressures on public spending are unlikely to be accommodated unless the size of the state finally grows or our demands on it change dramatically.

Please contact the seminar organisers Philip Arestis (pa267@cam.ac.uk) and Michael Kitson m.kitson@jbs.cam.ac.uk) in the event of a query.

Cost: No Charge